Arthur Miller’s War

Before young Arthur Miller left Wilmington in November 1941 and returned to the Library of Congress, he did one last group of’ recordings. At the town’s African American Odd Fellows Hall, he visited with a large group of African American women who were in the midst of a lengthy strike at the Southland Manufacturing Company, a textile plant that made men’s dress shirts.

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While he was in Wilmington working for the Library of Congress, Arthur Miller also talked with several city officials. At first, I didn’t expect these interviews to be as interesting as his conversations with the shipyard workers or with the men and women he encountered in the street.

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On another evening when they were in downtown Wilmington, N.C., Arthur Miller and his audio engineer, Johnny Langenegger, spied a cluster of cabdrivers standing on a street corner next to the city bus station.

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This is the 4th post in a 7-part series on the great American playwright Arthur Miller's sojourn in Wilmington, N.C. during the Second World War. When they were in Wilmington in 1941, Arthur Miller and his audio specialist, Johnny Langenegger, also just drove around the city looking for scenes and moments and stories that captured the … Continue reading Arthur Miller’s War, Part 4– “Worse than Hoover time”

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Arthur Miller did more than record the stories of the defense workers that flocked to Wilmington when they were in their mobile home camps. Other scenes unfolded at the shipyard itself. At one of those times, the young playwright stood near the shipyard’s main gate and simply described the shift change.

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“The scene is a row of trailers,” Arthur Miller intoned in the first words of the field recordings.
When I first turned on the old reel-to-reel recorder at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, I found the young playwright standing in a vast trailer camp that had been built in a maddening rush only a few months earlier.

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Today I am remembering a visit to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The center is located on a quiet hallway a floor below the great library’s main reading room and contains vast collections of oral histories, music and other audio recordings.
You can hear Mississippi sharecroppers singing the blues there. You can hear Polish immigrants playing polkas. You can hear Navajo sacred songs.
I was there to listen to audio recordings that the playwright Arthur Miller made on the North Carolina coast in the fall of 1941.

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This is David Cecelski’s official website. Here you’ll find my books and an assortment of my essays and lectures. You’ll also find a new project that features historical photographs of maritime life on the North Carolina coast between 1870 and 1941. In “Love in the Archives,” you can also follow my expeditions to museums, libraries and archives here and abroad as I search for the lost stories from our coastal past.

If you see something in a photograph or manuscript that I didn’t see, I hope you will let me know. If I got something wrong, I hope you will also let me know. And if you have an old diary, photograph or other historical document that you think might belong here, I’d love to see it

I hope you enjoy these stories as much as I enjoy writing them. I hope they will help you understand better my little corner of the Atlantic seacoast. Maybe they will even help you to grow a little closer to wherever you call home.